Overview

Our client Azavea is a Philadelphia-based civic technology firm that uses geospatial data to build software and data analytics for the web. They are looking to grow their Operations team to support new cloud computing operations capacity. Azavea both builds custom web apps and SaaS in several civic domains, including: climate change, urban ecosystem management, public safety, watersheds, and elections.

They are looking for a Software Engineer for their Urban Ecosystems team. A person that is passionate about building software that will have a positive impact – someone interested in public service, but not necessarily in working for a government or a non-profit organization, and someone who enjoys working in a variety of technology environments.

Azavea is a B Corporation committed to working on projects that have social and civic impact and advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Customers are local governments, non-profit organizations and academic or federal research projects. They build custom apps; perform geospatial analysis; manage several open source civic software projects (DistrictBuilder, OpenTreeMap, and others); and develop an open source, high performance computing framework, GeoTrellis, that enables them to build fast analytical applications by distributing the geospatial data processing. Developers work across the technology stack from database and application servers to modern, browser-based front-ends.

The Urban Ecosystems Team

Azavea has five software teams, all of which develop web mapping applications that use geospatial data. The teams differ in terms of the specific projects they develop and whether they are primarily product teams or professional services teams. The Urban Ecosystems team works on a couple of custom software projects related to urban forestry and digital history, but its primary focus is on developing and supporting OpenTreeMap, an open source SaaS product for tracking urban street trees and other green stormwater infrastructure as well as assessing the ecosystem services impact (stormwater, energy savings, carbon sequestration, air quality, and other impacts). OpenTreeMap is sold to local and state government and non-profit organizations around the world. It applies a mix of clever software, distributed processing, and AWS infrastructure to create a compelling urban ecosystem management tool for communities of all sizes. The Urban Ecosystems team is particularly strong with JavaScript, Python, PostgreSQL, and mobile applications.

What You’ll Do:

Implement application code, APIs, and web or mobile clients based on wireframes and designs developed by the UI/UX Design team.

Optimize database, server, and client performance to create applications with both functional and responsive user experiences.

Build, provision, and deploy servers in a repeatable way to AWS.

Respond to and assist the OpenTreeMap open source community.

Contribute to both a growing company and to the open source communities that support the work.

You should:

Know how to build and support scalable web applications in Python/Django, or another MVC framework (C#/.Net, Ruby/Rails, Java/JVM/Spring, Scala/Play). They do a lot of work in Python/Django, Javascript, and Scala and dabble in others depending on client and project requirements.

Demonstrating your open source or other community service contributions.

Background in projects related to sustainability and the environment.

Office and Benefits

The Philadelphia office is located in a brightly lit office on the 5th floor of a converted factory building in the Callowhill neighborhood, a short walk from Center City, the Reading Terminal Market and SEPTA subway and regional rail stations. For bicyclists, they have in-house bike parking, a shower and lockers. It’s an open office plan with several smaller rooms for team meetings, private space and concentration time. You get a top-end Linux workstation, Mac or Windows laptop with a pile of memory for VMs and extra monitors. They have flex-time to deal with personal stuff, and most employees work a 40 – 45 hour week on a regular schedule. After the first six months, developers can also spend up to 10% of their time on a geospatial open source, professional development, or R&D project.

They offer a salary commensurate with skills and experience and a benefits package that includes:

Fully subsidized health care, dental, prescription plan, including for spouse/partner and children

Medical reimbursement plan to cover what the health insurance does not